Yeah.. OTR implementations generally succeeded being more painful to use than PGP/GPG. Aaaand they don't even have the trust model of PGP... too much to sacrifice for the forward secrecy and what not.
I haven't had any trouble with OTR, and this is the first I've heard of interoperability problems (but I haven't gone looking for information on them before). I wonder if it's due to a lack of client diversity among my contacts. Most of us use either Adium (which has OTR built in) or Pidgin with the OTR plugin, and they seem to interoperate ok.
